Hélio Melo's Amazonian life at the Almeida & Dale’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024

With a unique visual language, Hélio Melo narrated different aspects of life in the Amazon rainforest, from the landscape and daily life of rubber tappers in the forests to the mythologies of the Amazonian peoples. Painting with ink and plant extracts, a technique that gives his works ferrous and greenish tones, Melo moves between storytelling and fabulation. Works such as this untitled, from 1989, demonstrate how the artist understands and represents interspecies relations.

“Melo is different from the majority of contemporary artists who use art as an instrument of criticism and militancy because he transcends the tone of explicit denunciation of the exploitation of an unprepared and uncared for labor force and enters the mythical and the fantastical by convening beings and fables from ancestral forest cultures, with images and allegories that symbolize and sum up the violent transformation of society and the landscape, ” wrote Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, curator of the exhibition “Hélio Melo” presented at Almeida & Dale in 2023.